Introduction

The, now previous, hosting company of my wife’s blog had a major data corruption and completely lost a years worth of database entries and files. There was no communication before we found the problem ourselves, so we were very unhappy and decided to reconstruct the host on another site.

Luckily I had set up WordPress to send a complete database dump weekly as tar.gz balls, so no database entries were lost. All uploaded images and such was permanently lost, but reconstructing this is much easier than reconstructing posts and comments.

Charset problems moving the site to another webhotel

After creating a backup of the files left on the old host I made a local copy to my computer and another copy to the new webhotel. After the DNS changes had gone through and had imported the database dump on the new hosts the only thing left was to edit wp-config.php with the new database settings… or so I thought. It turned out that the all the tables of the database were in charset latin1_swedish_ci, but some of the posts contained utf8 characters as well. The result was the all Danish letters and many special characters in english looked garbled on the blog.

After searching the web for hours through variations over simple search and replace, which I did not find feasible, I finally found the holy grail – the ‘replace’ command as part of the mysql (now mariadb) project. The following command corrected all entries in the sql file from the mix of different charsets to a consistent utf8 output that rendered beautifully on the website:

Introduction

I have been using a quite secure setup for the last couples of years with a 4 drive RAID 6 setup. This setup can tolerate two disk failures without any data loss. Recently though, I have been getting close to the edge of the filesystem and could use some extra space and since I have both monthly backup to an external hard drive and nightly offsite backup I am actually not very afraid of a data loss on a RAID 5 setup. So I have planned to change my 4 disk RAID 6 to a 4 disk RAID 5 without any spares.

A word of caution: Please do not do any of the actions below before a backup has been made.

Someone in my close family needed a update for a workstation primarily used for emailing, browsing, audio and light video editing. The computer was never used for any 3D demanding games, so no separate GPU was needed, provided that I could find a CPU with a on-die GPU. Furthermore a recently bought NAS took care of all the large files, so the objectives for the build was to create a silent, very fast booting computer that could also handle heavier problems as audio and video editing.

The following build is completely silent. The case has built-in heatpipes that cools the CPU, the PSU is also fanless and the SSD doesn’t make a sound. Still the SSD is blazing fast, the i5-3570K CPU is very capable and the on-die HD4000 GPU is more than enough for the workstation.

Components

Mid January 2013 in Denmark this totaled, with delivery, to 6711 DKK (1210 USD).

Just before I started my paternity leave I saw a documentary about flocking animals and how these can be modeled in computer simulation. I found it very exciting and eagerly thought I could implement a simulation in a days work. I, however, quite underestimated the free time available while on paternity leave and the project extended in to many pieces spread over a few weeks. First a little teaser from the animation I made using python and Matplotlib, where the Boids (birds, fish or flying sheep ..) are in blue and predators are in red:Continue reading →